Monday, November 24, 2014

The concept behind this cassette is that it is primarily instrumental music but in place of vocals are audio clips and those audio clips are taken from various anime. Has anyone ever done something like this before? Perhaps, but if they have I haven't really been aware of it and listened to it. Yes, a song here or there is common but not an entire cassette dedicated to anime audio clips with accompanying music.

While music is what I tend to write about what you need to realize when listening to this is that the general tone and feel of the music is often based upon what is being conveyed in the audio clip it surrounds. So really, in many ways these audio clips become the basis for the songs (or perhaps the songs were created and then audio clips were found to fit, but that might be a chicken/egg debate) and they just sort of mold themselves around each other.

The music itself is electronic at its core. It's not what I'd refer to directly as modern electronic music in the sense of dubstep or techno or whatever is popular these days. I also don't really consider this vaporwave though it has leanings toward that as well. The closest I can come to this at times is 8bit though I wouldn't even strictly limit it to that as there are instruments and sounds outside of the Game Boy.

For reasons more on the tone of the music, I can relate this with Slime Girls though (and very few other comparison points exist, if any at all) and for that I do feel the 8bit notion is the closest we're going to come to finding an answer though I wouldn't file this under 8bit still.

What remains most interesting to me about this cassette by Hudson Glover is the interaction of audio clips and music. How else could someone create something such as this without simply recreating this? You could chop up pieces of movies or television shows and use those audio clips, but wouldn't that reflect too closely to the soundtrack? Somehow this doesn't bridge that soundtrack line and it just works brilliantly.